I asked him how the town had grown in his memory.

“When I came here from the hills forty years ago,” said he, “long before the Russo-Turkish War, there were three houses here—­three only, two were wine-cellars.  Now Zugdida is second only to Kutais.  I remember how two more wine-cellars were built, and a small general shop, then a bread shop, then two more wine—­cellars, two little grocer’s shops, some farm-houses.  We became a fair-sized village, and wondered how we had grown.  The Russians came and built stone houses and a military barracks, a prison, a police-station, and a big church; then came the Hotel of Russia, the Universal Stores.  We built the broad, flag-stoned market, and named a Fair day; saddlery and sword shops opened, blacksmiths, gunsmiths, coppersmiths, jewel workers, tailors; Singer’s sewing machines came, two more hotels, and we grew and grew.  We have now over two hundred taverns.  We have offered the Government to pay for all the necessary land, and defray all minor expenses, if they will connect us with Poti by railway, and if it were not that so many people want bribes we should be part of Europe.  As it is, we’re just a bit of the old Caucasus.”

He pointed to a group of drunkards, all armed from head to foot, but now clinging to one another and raising their voices in Asiatic chanting.

After supper—­a stew of mutton and maize, with a bottle of very sweet rose-coloured wine—­the old man took me aside and made me a long harangue on life and death and the hereafter.  Better sermon on a Sunday evening I never heard in church.  He told me the whole course of the good man’s life and compared it with that of the bad man, weighed the two, and found the latter wanting on all counts, adding, however, that it was impossible to be good.

“How did you come to think so seriously of life?” I inquired.

“In this way,” he replied.  “Once I was very ’flee-by-the-sky’—­I didn’t care a rap, sinned much, and feared neither God nor the devil—­or, if anything, I feared the devil a little; for God I never had the least respect.  But one day I picked up a book written by one Andrew, and I read some facts that astonished me.  He said that in eight thousand years after the creation of the world the sun would go red and the moon grey, the sun would grow old and cease to warm the world—­just as you and I must inevitably grow old.  In that day would be born together, one in the East and one in the West, Christ and the Anti-Christ, and they would fight for the dominion of the world.  This story caused me to pause and think.  Hitherto I had taken all for granted.

“It had never occurred to me that the sun might stop shining, that the stars might go out.  I had scarcely thought that I myself might stop, might die.

“‘What happens to me when I die?’ I asked people.  ’God will judge you,’ they said.  ‘If good, you go to heaven; if evil, to hell.’  That did not satisfy me.  How did people know?  No one had ever come back to tell us how things were done after death.